Month: August 2011

A Third Day of Rioting in London

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Trevor Reeves said his business which has been in his family for five generations has been “completely trashed”

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Shops were looted and buildings set alight as police clashed with youths. The trouble also spread to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.

  • Several fires broke out in Croydon, including one at a large sofa factory which spread to neighbouring buildings and tram lines
  • In Hackney 200 riot officers with dogs and mounted police were located around Mare Street where police cars were damaged
  • Looters raided a Debenhams store and a row of shops in Lavender Hill in Clapham, as well as shops in Stratford High Street
  • A Sony warehouse in Solar Way, Enfield, a shopping centre in Woolwich New Road, a timber yard in Plashet Grove, East Ham and a building on Lavender Hill were all on fire
  • More than 100 people looted a Tesco store in Bethnal Green, the Met said, and two officers were injured
  • Cars were set on fire in Lewisham
  • A bus and shop were set alight in Peckham
  • Buses were diverted as the violence spread to Bromley High Street
  • There were reports of looting of phone shops in Woolwich High Street, in south London, and a torched police car
  • Shops and restaurants were damaged in Ealing, west London, and there was a fire in Haven Green park opposite Ealing Broadway Tube
  • Football matches at Charlton and West Ham which were due to be played on Tuesday have been postponed at the request of the police
  • At Clapham Junction looters stole masks from a fancy dress store to hide their identity

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One resident in Croydon, who gave his name as Adam, said he saw two cars which had been set on fire.

He said: “One older woman was dragged out and they set the car on fire. Then another car around the corner was on fire, then we counted about 12 to 15 shops that had been looted.

“The looting started about three hours ago. I just came back into my apartment and the looting was still going on – not a single policeman.”

“Not a single policeman.”

That’s not all that unusual in incidents like this. There just aren’t enough police. So what you get is:

What you won’t see is this:

Those are Koreans protecting a shop during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, when the police were nowhere to be found. You won’t see pictures of people defending their property against looters in London – that would get them arrested.

I expect the number of Brits fleeing Airstrip One for greener pastures will now increase above the 200,000 or so that have been leaving annually.

UPDATE:

Police lose control of streets shop owners form local “protection units”

News Desk 9am Sunday

Shop owners along Wood Green, Turnpike Lane and Green Lanes, the majority of which are of Kurdish or Turkish owned have formed local protection units following riots in Tottenham which have spilled over to Wood Green.

“We do not have any trust in the local police, our shops are next on the target list by the thugs who have ransacked Tottenham, we will protect our property”, said a leading member of the Green Lanes “unit”.

Shop owners have been seen by London Daily News reporters carrying crow bars, and other objects in case of attacks.

But, thankfully, no pictures which would be used as evidence against them.

The Tools and Mechanisms of Oppression

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Ayn Rand wrote in her frighteningly prophetic 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged many warnings, among which was this:

There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Create a nation of lawbreakers and then you can cash in on the guilt. Now that’s the system!

The Geek with a .45 wrote, back 2004 and unfortunately no longer available at his site, this warning:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

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We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

Assembly and activation proceeds apace.

Three recent books come to mind, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate, Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything by Gene Healy, and The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice by Paul Craig Roberts. There are others.

Just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that

For decades, the task of counting the total number of federal criminal laws has bedeviled lawyers, academics and government officials.


“You will have died and resurrected three times,” and still be trying to figure out the answer, said Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official.

They’ve given up even trying to count them.

As I said in Malice vs. Stupidity

At some point it becomes immaterial whether the laws were due to incompetence or maliciousness. That point is when their implementation is indistinguishable from maliciousness. I submit that we’ve passed that point, and the only thing preventing even more massive public blowback is our general ignorance and our well-established general respect for the Rule of Law. As I’ve said, the .gov has done a good job of practicing such persecution on a retail level, rather than wholesale, but it’s getting to the point where the abuse is going wholesale and the stories are getting out to the mass audience.

And I’ve said elsewhere I think a lot of people are getting fed up with ever-increasing government intrusion into our lives. Government interferes lightly on a wholesale basis, but it does its really offensive intrusions strictly retail. So long as the majority gets its bread and circuses, it will remain content.

Until it happens to you. Then you get pissed right quick, and wonder why nobody hears your side of the story.

I’ve reported here at TSM on just a tiny fraction of these prosecutions; George Norris and his orchid import business,  the persecution of Albert Kwan and the prosecution of Joseph Pelleteri are just some examples.  Other bloggers have as well.  Sebastian noted how an 11 year-old escaped the mailed fist of the law in Massachussetts with a mere suspension from school when he could have been prosecuted under felony law, for example. There are many, many, many more such examples. If you have your own, please feel free to leave them in the comments. Links would be appreciated.

But today’s post is inspired by a YouTube video I watched over at Jaded Haven. I’d not heard of the case, but I was not surprised.  Go watch.

Still, you don’t have to be surprised to have an RCOB event.

A recent Rassmussen poll indicates:

(J)ust 17% of Likely U.S. Voters think the federal government today has the consent of the governed. Sixty-nine percent (69%) believe the government does not have that consent. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided.

Is there any wonder why?

Tottenham Rampage

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In 1909 the Tottenham Outrage occurred. A pair of anarchists armed with then-new semi-automatic pistols attempted to rob a local business payroll, and went on a shooting spree in their attempt to escape. Normal citizens joined in the pursuit, going so far as to provide privately-owned weapons to the normally unarmed police in pursuit.  Their escape was foiled.

One hundred and two years later, same place, a different kind of outrage:

The riot that tore through parts of north London’s deprived Tottenham neighborhood has cast a pall over Britain’s capital, echoing an earlier era of racial unrest, while spreading malaise through a city preparing to host the Olympic Games.

Eight officers were hospitalized after a peaceful protest against the shooting death of a young man degenerated into a Saturday night rampage, with rioters torching a double-decker bus, destroying patrol cars and trashing a shopping mall.

Looters descended on the area around midnight, setting buildings alight, and piling stolen goods into cars and shopping carts. Sirens could be heard across the capital as authorities rushed reinforcements to the scene.

More information and pictures here.

Crank up Your Speakers

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A European Shell commercial that is music for car enthusiasts:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_kwxzU4wL4]

From a comment at The Truth About Cars review of the Bugatti Veyron comes this bit of universal truth:

I could never afford one, but I don’t want to live in a world where things like this are not possible.

The complete inverse, I gather, of what the proles are supposed to feel.

Quote of the Day – Endgame Edition

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This column is so right that it’s very difficult to pull just one piece out of it for a quote of the day, but Janet Daley’s UK Telegraph op-ed If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth is today’s must-read:

We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.

The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

That is the problem. So profound is its challenge to the received wisdom of postwar Western democratic life that it is unutterable in the EU circles in which the crucial decisions are being made – or rather, not being made.

The solution that is being offered to the political side of the dilemma is benign oligarchy.

Yes, that’s what’s being offered, but it’s not what will be delivered.

Read the whole piece.  Twice.  At the time of this writing there are nearly 800 comments.  One of them was this:

…this article is the most important one I have ever read in the mainstream media.

I concur.

This Sounds Familiar

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From that WSJ page mentioned in the previous post:

The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington, explains Eric Cantor, are too far apart for anything more than an armistice.

That sounds remarkably like Anarchangel’s quote from a while back:

There can be no useful debate between two people with different first principles, except on those principles themselves.

I quoted that in What We Got Here . . . is Failure to Communicate.  Also Thomas Sowell, from an Uncommon Knowledge interview:

Peter Robinson: If you had a sentence or two to say to the Cabinet assembled around President Obama, and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another, if you could beseech them to conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they leave office, what would you say?


Thomas Sowell: Actually, I would say only one word: Goodbye. Because I know there’s no point talking to them.

Sounds like Eric Cantor finally figured it out.